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 T he
biggest travesty of his generation is that families don’t dine
together," says Jean K Hopper, a noted American etiquette and protocol
consultant. "Dining together not only fosters good table manners but
good social skills. There’s an awareness of one another that comes from
sitting together." Eating together offers an ideal opportunity for a
family to communicate, to interact. Indeed, without a family meal to
bring everyone together, there is no other forum of communication, no
other focus on family life, no domestic debating chamber, no medium for
the exchange of wisdom between the different generations. Yet the custom
of a family eating together has been steadily fading in several
societies. For example, a majority of the British and Americans have
given up eating together. In many homes, nobody even cooks on a regular
basis. Anybody feeling hungry approaches the fridge and fashions a meal
for himself, or brings along some carry-home stuff. No fixed timings of
meals, no fixed place to eat. Each member of the household develops a
separate life, fitting eating into his or her own work-cum-recreation
schedule. In quite a few families, the only means of communication
between teenagers and their parents is now through slips pasted on the
fridge door. Others, such as the Italians, are still mostly keeping to
the custom of a family sitting down to a meal, once a day or at least
several times a week, while the housewife cooks. Children learn how to
manage a knife and fork, how to behave, how to talk. In this respect, we
are more like the Italians. But in some urban, upwardly-mobile circles,
the Anglo-American pattern seems to be setting in. Children tend to eat
in their rooms in the midst of their activities and at their own time.
In fact one gets an impression that many a teenager is at pains to avoid
any friendly talk with parents—keeping such conversation limited to
grunts and shrugs. The family meal (primarily the evening meal) is not
only the core curriculum in the school of civilised discourse; it is
also a set of protocols that curb our natural savagery and animal greed.
It cultivates in us a capacity for sharing and consideration for others.
Indeed, table manners are one of the subtlest lines separating civility
from barbarity. Dinner rituals have little to do with the income or the
social class of a family. It is not important whether you sit at a big
dining table or squat on the kitchen floor. And you could have the
simplest food imaginable; plain dal and roti would do. What really
counts is the grace with which food is served and accepted. It is
through this practice of the family sitting at meals and observing the
attendant conventions that youngsters learn the art of human
companionship, the culture of give and take. And the ideal family meal
calls for dining without distraction, not sitting in front of the TV.
Even otherwise, new research shows that families that watch TV during
dinner-time tend to develop poor eating habits, putting kids at risk
from obesity or malnutrition. A Tufts University study, recently
released by the American Academy of Paediatrics, found that when
families did not separate eating from other activities, particularly
watching TV, children consumed fewer fruits and vegetables and more junk
food. Eating is one of the most fundamental health-related behaviour we
have. Cutting out distractions at mealtimes, such as TV, is the best way
to ensure that healthier foods make it to the table. Once parents manage
to separate and structure eating times, incorporating healthy foods
becomes much simpler. A factor undermining the institution of the family
meal is the spreading habit of ‘grazing’. People, particularly
teenagers, keep on taking snacks at all hours or snatching food whenever
convenient. This does erode the imperative of a regular, fixed-time
sit-down meal. Teenagers gulping junk food slouched in front of the TV
or snacking at odd hours cooped up in their rooms, could not only be
nutritionally deprived, they are deprived of the best element of family
life, the family meal. It would be an error to underestimate its
importance in the character formation of the young. Well, their parents
can also be faulted for this development. These parents—often working
parents—may be too busy in their business deals or social whirl, or,
they may simply prefer nice, quiet meals. Eating with youngsters entails
enforcing a modicum of discipline and smoothening individual behaviour.
That way, all rituals involve some degree of
sacrifice in time and attention. And the same is true of the
sit-together family meal. "The family that prays together stays
together," says Al Scalpone. It could well be said that the family that
eats together stays together. |
